I’ve lived in Perth for just over three years and on this coming Monday I’ll be moving back to my original home of Melbourne, Victoria, and to join my girlfriend (who moved a few weeks earlier for work). It’s been an amazing experience living in one of the most isolated capital cities in the world, and one I will not forget.

Location and Career Change

Before I moved to Perth I was working as a Mac technician and SME consultant. I’d done web development on and off since 2005 but it was always as a side project and just a bit of fun. I had no intention of continuing to be a technician/SME consultant in Perth so a career change was in order. I’ve done web development as a hobby for a long time, so why not make a career out of it.

Sometimes turning a hobby into a job can take all the fun out of it. I love going to the gym and keeping fit, but I know I would never want to become a personal trainer, let alone work in a gym. Thankfully turning web development from a hobby into a career did not meet that unfortunate demise.

Web Developer, Officially!

My first job was handling the entire development process where I worked with some amazing talent in Perth. Henry Luong, Daniel Elliot, and Ryan Vincent were all really clever designers and it was a great experience to try and turn their designs into a reality. I knew that I was definitely on the right path, but I found I enjoyed more of the backend process. Dealing with browser quirks for the frontend frustrated me. I knew that I’d prefer to handle the backend side of things, and a year later got the opportunity of a lifetime to work at Humaan.

My last day at Humaan was yesterday but I was there for just under two years. Working with the team there has been an incredible experience and I’ve had the pleasure of working on some really cool projects, one of which is easily the biggest project I’ve ever got to work on. The team at Humaan are amazing and I feel truly honoured to have worked with them all for two years. It was easily the best job I’ve ever had. You know it’s a great job when you’re excited to go to work every day.

I’ve made some lifelong friends at Humaan and while it pains me to leave such an experienced team, it’s time to move on back home.

The Perth Web Community

When I moved to Perth and trying to immerse myself into the web scene I found a group on meetup.com called Front End Web Developers Perth (or just Fenders for short). There I met some really amazing people and learnt a tremendous amount of things!

The leader of the group, Mandy Michael (who I can neither confirm nor deny is also Batmandy) deserves special recognition. She built up a community that is super friendly, helpful, and supportive. Mandy gave me opportunities where I got to do a number of presentations, run a workshop, and be a judge for a competition. I am forever thankful to Mandy for those opportunities. I honestly believe the Perth web development community wouldn’t be the same without Mandy’s incredibly hard work and commitment to setting up the group, organising events, and just generally being an all-round superstar. Three cheers to Mandy!

Patima Tantiprasut also deserves a special mention, her infectious energy and personality drives Localhost. I honestly have no idea how Patima manages to do so many things but also remain the most energetic person I’ve ever met. Thank you Pats, you’re awesome!

Melbourne Bound

As I write this it’s Saturday evening. On Monday I fly back to Melbourne and start the next chapter of my life. I’ve got a gig as a developer for a small boutique development agency where I’ll be doing more PHP, Vue.js and probably some Golang! I’m super excited to see what comes next.

Tracking down bugs can be hard. Damn hard. And figuring out how or when they cropped up in the first place can be even harder. Recently, we launched our social media aggregator platform, Waaffle. It’s written in Laravel and deployed with Envoyer, but we also took the opportunity to try out Sentry for tracking bugs.

Spoiler alert: it was awesome.

One of the features I really like is the ability to track releases, which means you can tell at a glance which release was responsible for your bug. We’ve got a deployment hook in Envoyer that pings Sentry when we deploy a new release. Our hook runs in the “After” section of the “Activate New Release” action and contains the following command:

(FYI, it’s the very last post-deployment hook we run, just in case another hook fails.)

The Sentry PHP package includes a section in the config for specifying your app version. However, things can get tricky if, like us, you’re using, say, git commit hashes instead of version numbers.

Thankfully, Sentry’s Laravel package provides code for a nice release hash you can use for getting your git commit hash:

'release' => trim(exec('git log --pretty="%h" -n1 HEAD'))

Which if you run in Artisan’s tinker mode, gives you something like this:

1a2b3c

Now the problem: we use Envoyer for our deployments, which downloads the tarball of a specified branch/release/tag instead the entire git repository. That tarball doesn’t contain any of the git history in it, so it’s not technically a repository, thus running the Sentry Laravel command won’t give you a commit hash. If you try, you’ll get the following lovely error:

fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

Which means if Sentry tracks an error and saves it, you’ll see there’s no release attached to the issue. Drats!

Somehow, we need a way to get the current commit hash from our Envoyer deployments so we can tell Sentry how to get the current commit. Thankfully, Envoyer comes to the rescue!

In the Envoyer docs, under Deployment Hooks, you’ll see a section on how you can get the current git commit hash (or sha1 hash). Now, this hash is actually the first 12 characters of the current git commit hash – aka. something you can use in the deployment lifecycle.

From here, we want to target the current release directory, so let’s create a deployment hook in the “After” section of “Activate New Release” and call it “Write Git Hash to File” with the user “forge”:

echo "{{ sha }}" > {{release}}/.commit_hash

Pretty simple, huh? All it does is echoes the current git hash to stdout (standard output), then we redirect that output to a file called .commit_hash in the current release directory. The single arrow (>) means “set the file .commit_hash to 0 length, then append to it”. If we used two arrows (>>) we’d only append to the file, which we wouldn’t want to do – though technically it doesn’t really matter given the release directory has just been created, but it’s the principle of the thing!

Once we’ve got that file written on every deployment, we need to tell Sentry how to get that commit hash! If you wanted to, you could change the config so Sentry fetches the release, like so:

'release' => trim(exec('echo "$(< .commit_hash)"'))

(Note that I’m using echo and redirection here, I don’t want to get into the UUOC debate!)

Except this only works if you have that .commit_hash file in every environment, which we don’t. So, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. What we need is a solution that uses the .commit_hash file if it exists, or falls back to a git repository, or finally, returns null if neither of those exist.

In our project, we’ve got a small helpers file with all functions that exist in the global namespace. That’s where we put our solution:

Pretty basic really – just an if/elseif/else block with three possible outcomes. Note that I’m using the base_path Laravel helper, so we can be sure we’ve got the full path to the file/folder in question. Then, in our Sentry configuration file we have the following for the release:

'release' => get_commit_hash(),

Now whenever Sentry needs the commit hash, it’ll call that function and get its return value. Nice! And for those of you concerned about the overheads of getting the commit hash, you can do a php artisan config:cache so the hash is only calculated once. I highly recommend caching the app configuration as part of your deployment process to help to make things that little bit faster. That file is located in bootstrap/cache/config.php and you can verify the existence of this cached value by doing the following (in the root of the project, with the configuration cached):

So I got punched in the face this morning. “Why?” you ask? Because I stepped in to prevent a fight.

Northbridge, the lively hub of Perth, has a bit of an assault problem (funnily enough, the brawl in that article was the exact same place as my incident). The combination of alcohol, drugs, and a culture that promotes fist fighting, in my opinion leads to this anti-social and violent behaviour.

I was on my way home from a work dinner (followed by some 90s pop hits) when two men decided to take it outside, as they say. Normally I wouldn’t be one to get involved in someone else’s fight, but when it occurred literally right next to me, I was unwittingly brought into the situation.

Because the elbow of the windup for the punch meant for the victim almost hit me, I grabbed the arm and started trying to talk him down when he decided to shut me up by punching me in the mouth. I guess it worked because I ended up with my butt on the ground (and with a pair of now broken headphones). I’m very lucky to have not hit my head on the pavement, or on the corner of a table just next to where the incident took place.

Thankfully there were other people around, and some police officers were only about a hundred metres up the road so they were able to quickly intervene and restrain the attacker. After giving my side of the story to the police and knowing that he was heading off to the local police station, I made my way home and called it a night.

Today I went to the doctor to get a checkup to ensure there was no bad damage done to me. Again, thankfully, nothing bad, just a swollen lip and a bit of a sore jaw. Nothing serious at all. But it could’ve been much worse.

Whenever an assault hits the news I often see that people ask for more police presence. In this case, there were uniformed police officers around a hundred metres up the road so how much more police presence does there need to be for it to become a deterrence? Have officers stationed every fifty metres? Doesn’t really sound that practical.

I’m far from an expert in preventing violence so I don’t have any good ideas or thoughts on how to combat anti-social behaviour. Gone are the days where the Good Samaritan can be safe when stepping in to help another person. It’s a shame, really.

Why am I posting this? Mainly because I’m annoyed and frustrated that these kind of incidents keep happening, week after week, day after day. Come on people, let’s be nice to each other. As George Costanza would say:

In case you’ve been living under a rock, LocalStorage is a JavaScript API that allows you to store content in the browser’s cache and access it later on when you need it. Similar to how cookies work, but you’ve got much more than ~4KB (the maximum size for a cookie). That said, while there’s no size limit for each key/value pair in LocalStorage, you’re restricted to around 5-10 MB for each domain. I say 5-10 MB because as per usual, different browsers have different maximum limits. Classic!

Recently we’ve had the opportunity to use LocalStorage for our content. I quite liked it at first because it was very simple to use, but it wasn’t long before we ran into issues. Get this: LocalStorage stores content indefinitely, while SessionStorage stores content for the lifetime of the browser session… and there’s no middle ground. What if I want to store something for 30 minutes? Tough luck!

To make things more interesting, even though some browsers report that they have LocalStorage (I’m looking at you, Safari in Private Browsing mode!) you can’t actually use it (trying to write to/read from it will throw an exception).

Bearing these in mind, we decided to write a small custom library that gives you the ability to use expiries, fail-safe LocalStorage detection, and callbacks for when fetching data doesn’t run as expected.

This method makes sure we can actually use LocalStorage, bypassing the likes of our aforementioned friend, Safari in Private Browsing mode. Here we wrap the LocalStorage set/get in a try/catch statement to catch any read/write exceptions.

Then, we call supportsLocalStorage() at the start of all the other methods to ensure we can actually use LocalStorage. If not, just abort any call early.

Now let’s look at the setter, setItem():

Not a particularly complex method when you think about it. The first two parameters are the key and value for the content you want to store. If you’re experienced with JavaScript (or any other language that uses the concept of keys and values with arrays/objects/hashes/etc) you’ll understand what they mean with no problems. The value can be anything that the core JSON object can stringify.

The last parameter, expiry, is an optional numeric parameter that if supplied, is used as the lifespan of your key/value combination. When combined with our LocalStorage getter, we can use this expiry value to know whether we should bust the key/value next time we go to fetch it!

Be warned: there’s not a tremendous amount of validation ensuring legitimate numbers are used as an expiry – just provide an integer for the number of seconds you want your key/value combination remaining valid in the LocalStorage cache. It’s easy, you’ll be fine.

You’ll notice this method returns true without checking whether your item was actually set in LocalStorage. Unfortunately the API itself doesn’t return a “save” response, so we have to assume the best and say that it did. But if this isn’t good enough, you can write a fetch method to confirm your suspicions. To me, that seems like overkill because the ideal time to check your item is when you’re actually fetching the data to use it. LocalStorage, like cookies, can be easily modified by the end user, so don’t assume that just because you saved it, it’ll be there the next time you go to pull it.

Our next very important method is our getter, getItem()!

This method is a little more complex. Obviously, the first parameter is the key name for the value you want to retrieve. The second value, however, is a callback you can provide to handle when a value doesn’t exist in LocalStorage. While a callback isn’t technically necessary, because LocalStorage calls aren’t asynchronous, I prefer using them as I feel it makes my code neater.

In your closure, your value in LocalStorage will be returned if it exists. Otherwise, if it doesn’t exist or if it has expired, you’ll get a null return value. This was the cleanest way I could come up with for handling both scenarios, which unfortunately does mean having to do an if/else statement in the closure to check whether the response is null or not.

Finally, our last method is a simple remover method.

The native LocalStorage method doesn’t return a status on whether the operation was successful or not, so I mimic the core method by returning void. Again, you could use a getter to ensure data has been removed, but I don’t really see a point in ensuring the core method has worked correctly.

Usage Examples

Both of these examples use the expiry feature in the LocalStorage helper. If the devices key/value doesn’t exist in LocalStorage, we’ll fetch it via AJAX and save it to LocalStorage for 1 hour (60 minutes), then either pass it off to another function or return it.

And there you have it! Check the Bitbucket snippet link for the latest updates as we continue to use and refine our LocalStorage helper.

When Instagram added the ability to upload non-square media images to their service, the only way to get a cropped version of the image from the API was via the thumbnail attribute from the media endpoint. Those familiar with the API would know that Instagram’s thumbnails are served at a rather small size of 150×150 which is alright in some cases, but if you need a larger thumbnail size a 150×150 image scales up very poorly.

Here’s the images attribute in the API response for a recent Instagram post we did:

And here’s the thumbnail for that image:

Scaling that thumbnail up even 1.5 times makes it look very grainy and shows very little detail. For normal square images you can just use a different image size (like low_resolution or standard_resolution), but for images that aren’t square, you won’t get a nice square image. Not great if you’re trying to use a square grid to display Instagram pictures.

Now, here’s the images attribute in an API response for another recent Instagram post we did, except this time the image in question is landscaped:

Instagram are nice enough to provide a cropped, square version of the image for the thumbnail, but the low_resolution and standard_resolution URLs are both uncropped and are not square. Gross!

Say we want a 320×320 thumbnail of the Instagram post, but as you can see, we want a square image. If we use the low_resolution URI, we’ll get this:

If you take a look at the URIs for the images, you’ll notice that the thumbnail URI has an extra parameter in the filename path… the magical crop dimensions! Unfortunately, the crop dimensions aren’t accessible anywhere else in the API (as far as I know), except for in the thumbnail URI. With a bit of spelunking and messing around with the URI, you can change the s150x150 part of the URI to s200x200 for example to get a 200×200 sized thumbnail.

With that in mind, I’ve set the thumbnail URL to use 320×320 instead of 150×150 and voila! We have a larger, square version of the Instagram image:

Note that you can’t provide arbitrary dimensions and expect the API to automagically generate custom images sizes to your specification (Instagram isn’t an image processing CDN!). Change the dimensions to s220x220 and you’ll see what I mean.

If you run the above command you’ll see that the server returns a 404 “Unsupported Size” error in the headers but the body response is 5xx server error. Assuming the thumbnail size you wanted was a thumbnail size Instagram generated, you can semi-reliably use your custom dimensions, however I couldn’t guarantee that those thumbnail sizes will remain accessible forever. We’ve decided to bite the bullet and use 320×320 image dimensions where we can, so fingers crossed they don’t remove those dimensions!

If you’re crawling the API with a script, you can do something like this in PHP to alter the thumbnail (where $post is your Instagram post object):